Brought to you by…

Posts Tagged ‘C64’

I’ve always got a soft spot for Cauldron, even though the game was stupidly hard and confusing and clunky and OK fine I admit it it’s not that great any more.

But! It was still one of the first games I got for my C64, and I had fun flying around the Defender-style level. It wasn’t until ages later I discovered you could actually enter the houses you flew over all the time, and I kinda wish I didn’t because I’d have much fonder memories of this! Those levels were just stupid!

Here are some other comics you might like!

One of the nice things about doing Blow The Cartridge (besides the money, fame and countless Hollywood celebrities that throw themselves at me, of course) is that every now and then I can discover a classic game that for one reason or another slipped by me when it first came out. Solar Jetman is one of these games!

For some reason I just thought this was a souped up version of Rare’s earlier Jetpac title, one that didn’t really interest me upon its initial release – plus it was on the NES which as you know wasn’t exactly on my radar. However I gave this a solid play when I started work on ths comic and I couldn’t have been more wrong about it – Solar Jetman is awesome! It’s basically a superior version of Thrust on the C64, which is a game I absolutely adored back in the day, and there’s tons of exploration and shooting involved and the controls aren’t torturous.

I also rediscovered that there is an unreleased C64 version of this out there, and it’s FANTASTIC – but I have to admit the NES version just looks a bit nicer. Man, I’m almost mad I missed out on playing this when it first appeared!

Here are some other comics you might like!

Yep, the first video game I ever saw (or at least, remember seeing) was Pooyan in the corner store near my grandma’s house, and it completely blew my freaking mind apart. I remember being completely besotted with the idea you could have cartoons on a TV that you could control, that was a pretty abstract concept for someone just used to TV being a passive experience. It’s one of the things that video games do better than almost anything else.

If only that store didn’t have that Pooyan machine, I might have stayed a normal kid that rode bikes and went outside!

Here are some other comics you might like!

Oh maaan I loved the TMNT Arcade game back in the day. I was a huge Turtles junkie and the chance to play a video game about them was just too much for my tiny little mind to handle. I sunk a big pile of change into the local arcade machine, and remember calling up the local distributor to ask how much it would cost me to buy an arcade machine of my own – a whopping $7,000!

Thankfully they ported it to the humble C64 and it was pretty awesome.

A few years back they released it on Xbox LIVE Arcade and…yeah, it was pretty good, but as a beat ’em up it was retty repetitive, even with the cool freeway level. Oh, remember Konami? Sigh.

I liked playing Mr. Heli a lot! It was a cute little shmup, and I liked the adorable vehicle designs, and the way you had to destroy the environment to get money and access to shops. The comic was originally going to be about how much of a hassle it was to go to the shops to get some milk, but that would have required lots of drawing and you guys know how I feel about effort.

Mr. Heli also had homing missiles, which as we all know are just the absolute best thing to have in any video game. I’d like a video game with JUST homing missiles. Like, you play AS a homing missile and you fire out other homing missiles at other homing missiles that would be neat someone get the boss of videogames on the phone let’s do a deal.

Here are some other comics you might like!

OK, shameful admission time: As a kid I was never really into Transformers. I knew they were cool, and I had friends who had dozens of the damn things, but I dunno they just never grabbed me the way, say, He-Man did. I thought the little hologram stickers that you had to rub to reveal were pretty cool!

Here are some other comics you might like!

I loved this game to bits on the old Atari 2600 – the game just felt like it was incredibly huge, and there was so much to explore. It’s one of the first games that had a map you had to memorise, and there were secrets galore waiting to be discovered. Heck, I saw a map of the game a few months ago and was astounded to discover there was a room I didn’t already know about!

But I never could understand why Pitfall Harry couldn’t just jump over Roland the Rat near the beginning, that always felt cheap.